Everything on Ahmadnagar Sultanate

Regional Divisions

22 items

• The Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagar: A Convert's Son, a Warrior Queen, and an Ethiopian Regent — essay · Ahmadnagar Sultanate · 17 sources
  For a century and a half a mid-sized Deccan kingdom held the ground between the Mughal north and the sultanates of the south. Ahmadnagar's story is carried by three unlikely figures: a founder whose father was a Brahmin convert, a dowager queen who faced down Akbar's son from a besieged fort, and an Ethiopian former slave who out-generalled two emperors. Around each, legend has grown thick; this essay keeps the attested record in view.
• The Regent Who Was Bought: Malik Ambar and the Habshis of the Deccan — essay · Malik Ambar and the Habshis · 21 sources
  He was sold at least three times before he was twenty, and for the last quarter-century of his life he governed a kingdom. Malik Ambar held no throne and claimed none: he made sultans, married his daughter to one and poisoned the same man ten years later, held two Mughal emperors out of the Deccan with light cavalry, built a city and the waterworks that made it habitable, and left the revenue settlement that outlived his kingdom by centuries. This is the attested record, and the places where it stops.
• Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I: How a Slave’s Son Made a Kingdom — essay · Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I — founder 1490 · 26 sources
  When the Bahmani kingdom of the Deccan came apart in the 1480s and 1490s it did not fall to an invader; it was divided among its own provincial governors, and Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I was the first of them to make the break stick. He was the son of a Brahmin war captive who had been converted, enslaved and raised into the highest office of the Bahmani state, and he inherited from his murdered father not a dynasty but a faction and a grievance. What he built instead - out of a captured hill-fort treasury, a set of offices only a king could create, a night attack outside a village called Bhingar, and a purpose-built capital sited to starve a rival fortress - is the clearest case in Deccan history of sovereignty assembled piece by piece rather than proclaimed. It is also a case in which the new state's own court chronicle could not bear the founder's origins and invented better ones.
• Fall to Shah Jahan 1636: The Extinction of the Nizam Shahi Sultanate — essay · Fall to Shah Jahan 1636 · 26 sources
  The sultanate of Ahmadnagar did not fall once; it fell in stages, and the last stage was a paper one. The Mughal capture of Daulatabad in 1633 took the capital, the treasury and the reigning prince, but it left the title itself lying loose in the Deccan — and within months a Maratha commander in Bijapuri pay, Shahji Bhonsle, had picked it up, crowned a boy of the royal house, and run a state in his name for three years. What ended the dynasty was not a battle but a treaty: on 6 May 1636 Shah Jahan and Muhammad Adil Shah agreed to divide the Nizam Shahi lands between them, and one article of that agreement concerned a single jagirdar by name. This essay follows the machinery of that extinction — who kept the fiction alive, what it was worth in cash, which faction at Bijapur pulled the plug, and what happened to the last claimant, who was delivered on a hillside and disappeared into a prison that already held two of his kinsmen.

• Nizam Shahi Dynasty — Dynasty · 1490 – 1636 · Ahmadnagar Sultanate
  The Ahmadnagar sultanate — the Deccan state that an enslaved Ethiopian held together against the Mughal empire for a quarter of a century.
• Malik Ambar — Person · c. 1548 – 1626 · Ahmadnagar Sultanate
  Born in Ethiopia, sold as a slave, and for twenty-five years the effective ruler of a Deccan kingdom — the man who held Ahmadnagar against the Mughal empire.
• Aurangabad (Khadki) — Place · founded 1610 as Khadki · Ahmadnagar Sultanate
  Founded by Malik Ambar as Khadki, later renamed for the emperor whose armies he had spent his life frustrating.
• Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I — Person · r. 1490 – 1510 · Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah I — founder 1490
  Son of a Bahmani minister, he took his own name into the Friday prayer at Junnar, withdrew it when his officers objected, and put it back when they asked — Ferishta’s account of how the Ahmadnagar sultanate began is an account of hesitation.
• Burhan Nizam Shah I — Person · r. 1510 – 1553 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Succeeded at seven under a protector, survived a palace plot to replace him with his infant brother, reigned forty-seven years, and was embalmed and sent to Karbala.
• Husain Nizam Shah I — Person · r. 1553 – 1565 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Succeeded at thirteen with his full brother disputing the title, led the Deccan confederacy that destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota, and died five months after the victory.
• Murtaza Nizam Shah I — Person · r. 1565 – 1588 · Murtaza Nizam Shah I 1565–1588
  Ferishta’s chapter calls him “Diwana, or, the Madman”: a boy king whose mother governed from behind a curtain, who unseated her at fourteen, took Berar, and was suffocated in a bath-house on his son’s order.
• Miran Husain Nizam Shah — Person · r. 1588 – 1589 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Murdered his father to take the throne, had fifteen princes of the house killed in a day on his minister’s advice, and within the year was deposed by that minister and his head planted on a bastion.
• Ismail Nizam Shah — Person · r. 1589 – 1591 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Fetched from a hill-fort at eleven to be a minister’s king, then a Mahdavi faction’s king, and finally deposed by his own father — the reign that shows what “installation” means.
• Burhan Nizam Shah II — Person · r. 1591 – 1595 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Twice failed to take the throne from his brother, sheltered with Akbar, and then took it from his own son — an old man’s reign of four years that restored the Shia rite and expelled the Mahdavis.
• Ibrahim Nizam Shah — Person · r. 1595, four months · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  The one Ahmadnagar accession Ferishta calls a lineal succession — and a reign of four months, ended by “the intemperance of the King, who is killed, and his army defeated” against Bijapur.
• Ahmad Nizam Shah II, son of Shah Tahir — Person · r. 1595 – 1596, set aside as a pretender · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Brought from Daulatabad “with great pomp” and crowned because a minister preferred him to an infant under Chand Bibi’s regency — and set aside within the year when it “was discovered that Ahmud Shah was not of the Nizam Shahy family”.
• Bahadur Nizam Shah — Person · r. 1596 – 1600; then a prisoner at Gwalior · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  An infant in arms fetched out of a hill-fort by his great-aunt and proclaimed king, whose reign is Chand Bibi’s regency and whose reign ends when the garrison murders her and Akbar’s son storms the fort.
• Murtaza Nizam Shah II — Person · r. 1600 – 1610 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Malik Ambar’s king: “the son of Shah Ally, fills the throne of the Nizam Shahy dynasty. The affairs of the state are conducted by his minister” — Ferishta’s present tense, written while both men lived.
• Burhan Nizam Shah III — Person · r. 1610 – c. 1631 · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  The sultan of Malik Ambar’s last sixteen years and of his son Fath Khan’s first five — killed by Fath Khan “in the name of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan” — and a ruler whose very numbering the sources cannot agree on.
• Husain Nizam Shah III — Person · r. 1632 – 1633; a prisoner at Gwalior thereafter · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  Fath Khan’s king, surrendered with the fortress of Daulatabad in June 1633 and sent north to Gwalior, where the imperial chronicle noticed him only as one of two Nizam Shahi captives already held there.
• Murtaza Nizam Shah III — Person · r. 1633 – 1636, in Shahji’s keeping · Nizam Shahi Dynasty
  A boy of ten or eleven taken out of a hill-fort by Shahji Bhonsle and crowned, and a state run in his name for three years until a treaty between Shah Jahan and Bijapur divided the kingdom and left no throne to sit on.
• Chand Bibi — Person · regent at Bijapur in the 1580s and at Ahmadnagar 1596 – 1600; killed 1600 · Chand Bibi — regent 1595–1600
  Daughter of one sultanate, dowager-queen of another, jailed at Satara by one regent and restored by the mob that expelled him, then regent for her infant great-nephew at Ahmadnagar until her own garrison murdered her — the one person in the Great Houses who belongs to two of its three houses.